Doing business through an online store is commonplace these days, with countless online stores flooding the internet. Prestashop is a common technology for many such sites.
Prestashop is an open-source e-commerce software. Nearly 250,000 websites in the world (almost 0.5%) use Prestashop. Being a popular technology, Prestashop offers several ways to optimize a site built with it. The goal is to get a better ranking in the different search engines and a higher number of conversions.
The goal of any e-commerce site is to attract traffic and get as many sales as possible. This can be achieved by optimizing the site for SEO. So, there are some simple and accessible ways to improve your Prestashop.
Optimize the Prestashop homepage
Your homepage is like your online storefront. So, it should not only look impressive but also rank higher in search results. To do this, you need to include content and your most important keyword as well as illustrations on your homepage. The content of the homepage as well as your main product should not change too often because the search engine cannot then determine what is important to you. In addition, the homepage should load quickly, without errors, and offer a pleasant browsing experience.
Determine your keywords
It is imperative that you determine your keywords and test their performance using a keyword planner (like the dedicated section in Google Ads or Ubersuggest, for example). There you can find the monthly global and local searches, relevance, and competition of the keywords. Words with average competition and searches are the best candidates for your keywords.
External links to help your SEO
Having other sites link to your site is also a common SEO tactic. You can contact bloggers and press release sites. Bloggers can agree to write about your product and provide a link to your site. This will not only create external links but also increase the possibility of your site attracting traffic from those links. You can also post your press releases on different sites, which is also a good source of the traffic to your site. Another way to get external links is to write guest posts. You can get a reference to your site in these posts. Another way is to look for sites that have mentioned your site without providing a link. You can ask them to include a link to your site.
Fill in all required product information
Fill in all required fields like product description, categories, and manufacturers with original content. This is important from an SEO perspective. In addition, you should always provide information for the following: meta titles, meta descriptions, and meta tags in the product information sheets, these are the different meta tags. You also need to provide an appropriate URL (Even if it has little impact on the various search engines).
Include social sharing options
It is also helpful to have social sharing buttons on your websites. When people share your content with their friends, it increases the chances of attracting them to your site. Thus, you can attract new customers to your website.
Generate a sitemap and robots.txt in Prestashop
The Google Sitemap module helps you to create a sitemap for your website and keep it up to date. It is an XML file that lists all the products and pages of the site. The sitemap is used for the indexation of the pages and is therefore important from the SEO point of view. Robots.txt is a file automatically generated in Prestashop and informs search engine crawlers and spiders of the parts of the Prestashop site not to be indexed. It is useful to save bandwidth and server resources.
Have a content calendar and articles with keywords
If your site has all the products for a specific occasion, then you can publish articles on those particular dates with other pages pointing to them. This way, you can write articles that include the most relevant keywords for the occasion. However, you should not try to put too many keywords (keyword stuffing) in one article, as this could be negatively considered by the search engine.
A faster Prestashop
A slow e-commerce site can decrease the conversion rate, sales, and search engine ranking. Therefore, it is very important that the site loads faster. Here are some important suggestions to have a fast loading website:
- Compressing, combining, and caching help the site load faster. Compressing reduces the CSS and JavaScript code that is then combined and cached.
- Poor quality images can slow down the website, so it is important that the images are optimized for faster website loading. You should remove all unwanted modules, as they usually slow down the website. Inactive modules can be recognized using the debugging profiling in the Prestashop panel. Using the CDN (Content Delivery Network) will help the website load faster, even on sites that are very far from the hosting server.
Use Schema.org on your Prestashop
Using this type of tag improves websites by creating a structured data markup schema, also called “rich snippet“. It is supported by all major search engines. The “itemtype” tag helps to classify whether something is a website, an online store, or something else. It helps put otherwise ambiguous pages into context.
Using Google Analytics and Google Search Console
The use of Google Analytics and Search Console can be easily included in your site. In fact, you only need to place a small script in the code for them to work. Google Analytics provides useful information about website traffic, while Google Search Console helps determine how often the website is listed in search results and click data
Removing duplicate pages will help your SEO
It is not uncommon to find duplicate pages within a Prestashop. They have the same URL with different parameters. This can be avoided by having a single page or by working within Prestashop core for a different title, meta description, and URL for each page.
*****
In addition, Prestashop also provides an SEO module. This one can be very useful to manage all the main SEO functions. The goal of any business is to earn revenue and this is only possible by getting a favorable position in the search engine results. Prestashop offers simple ways to implement an optimal SEO strategy, making it an obvious choice for e-commerce.
To implement a sustainable SEO strategy, our agency is at your disposal.
Suivez-nous sur nos réseaux sociaux:
